


Half at-home in the world

by lbmisscharlie



Series: Still the Walls Do Not Fall [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Army, Art, Art Criticism, Art Criticism as character development, Enlistment, F/F, Gen, Gender Identity, Gender Issues, Genderswap, Grief/Mourning, Period-Typical Sexism, Rule 63, Sexism, Socialism, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-28 20:21:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7655410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky takes up space: she can. But no one’s ever taken Steve seriously in trousers or in skirts, and even less when she puts her fists up, plants her feet, most of the time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half at-home in the world

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to [Peninsulam](http://archiveofourown.org/users/peninsulam), champion, friend, beta extraordinaire.

_Brooklyn, 1938_

Bucky places the key in Steve’s palm like she’s doing her a favor. “You don’t even need to do anything for it,” she says, with a broad wink. Steve bares her teeth in response, shoving the key into her pocket. 

The apartment is far smaller than her last one – the one trimmed with Ma’s hand-sewn curtains and the quilt Steve’s grandma had brought with her from Ireland. It feels cavernous without her bossy voice and the smell of the herbs she coaxed into reluctant life on the kitchen windowsill. Bucky is used to sharing a bedroom with her sisters, but Steve never has; it was just her and Ma, and her bedroom had been little bigger than a closet, but it had been hers.

Here, two single beds are shoved as far apart as the small room allows. They’re bare, the mattresses lumpy. Steve hauls her suitcase onto one – the one under the window – but feels a small twist of guilt for claiming it before Bucky even came in, for seeing the dappled, warm light that spilled across the narrow mattress and taking it for her own.

But when Bucky comes in, she just cuffs Steve’s shoulder and says, “Good light for sketching,” leaving her own case on the other bed. 

The rest is a narrow galley kitchen and a parlor with a sofa older than either of them taking up most of the space. They face the rear courtyard, and even now with the windows closed the sounds of kids playing, folks doing the washing, and shouted gossip filter through the walls. Steve hasn’t had time to hope for a goddamn thing – the word itself claws angrily at her heart, as though reminding her that she doesn’t have the right to hope for anything, not when everyone in her life gives of themselves the way they do – but Bucky stands, pleased as a baron, in the living room, slightly daunted by the enormous sofa but shoulders up and proud. 

She turns and grins at Steve like the world is all theirs.

++

The next day, Rebecca shows up hefting a wooden chest. She drops it in the doorway and steps over it, hands on hips as she surveys the unruly apartment. They have almost nothing between the two of them – Ma’s curtains and some kitchen odds and ends, a rickety table Bucky hammered together out of scraps, the steamship of a sofa, now shoved enough to one side to skirt around it to get to the window. There’s an upended crate against one wall, waiting for the radio Bucky’s been buying on payment plan for six months.

“I was going to come get this on the weekend,” Bucky says, cracking open the lid.

“Well, I wanted to see the place,” Rebecca answers. Her face is unimpressed. “And I needed some air; you’ve been gone a day, and they’ve already started in on me.”

Bucky sits back on her heels. “What this time?”

Rebecca runs a finger across the stove; they haven’t had a chance to clean it yet, so it comes back greasy. She raises an eyebrow at Steve, who blushes a bit. “The usual,” she says to Bucky. “Straight and narrow, clean nose, good grades. Oh, and no boxing.” Bucky at least has the good grace to flush a little. She’s always been good at school, but, well, the rest of it is more of a struggle. “You’ll never make Buck here a good housewife if you don’t know how to clean a stove,” she says to Steve. The corner of her lip twitches.

“Yeah, well, Buck hasn’t bought me any cleaning supplies yet. We’ve got the worst table in Brooklyn, but no bleach.” 

They both grin at Bucky’s protestation. Grabbing a length of fabric from the chest on the floor, Bucky tosses it at Steve. “Cover it up with that if it’s such an eyesore.”

Steve unfurls it: a perfectly respectable white tablecloth, with stitchwork around the edges. It’s simple, plain, sharp-cornered, and will suit their home just fine. Neither of them have ever been much taken by lace, anyway.

“What is this?”

“Gosh, Steve, I thought your momma raised you better than that. It’s called a tablecloth, you put it on your table.”

Steve scoffs. “You know I mean that box in front of you.”

“This?” Bucky spreads her hands, encompassing the chest. “This is my trousseau,” she says, proudly. Steve blinks.

“Your –?” 

“Betcha didn’t know I was such an eligible lady to be movin’ in with. Been building this up for years, waiting for the right man to snatch me up.” She turns, drops her chin, and looks up at Steve through her eyelashes, a parody of a pinup. Something in Steve clenches. “You’ll have to do, I suppose.”

Rebecca’s eyes roll so wide as to almost be audible. “She wasn’t this happy when Mom and Dad gave it to her and told her what it was for, let me tell you. I think her exact words were that it was a ‘damn fool thing to waste money on.’”

Bucky doesn’t deny it. “Yeah, well, up until this very moment I’d’ve preferred some boxing gloves or a new pair of boots each birthday. But it turns out, having a home works better if you’ve got some stuff to put in it.” She digs into the chest, underneath a small pile of linens, and pulls out a saucepan in one hand and a spatula in the other. She’s smiling so hard that Steve can’t help but go and kneel next to her, to help her remove each thing and examine it.

“We’ll be just fine, won’t we, Stevie?” It’s a small supply, but it has all the essentials they’ve been missing, plus a few new dishcloths a sight cleaner than the ones they’ve been making do with and a set of napkins to go with the tablecloth. Not much like the Barnes’s family home, but not much rougher than she’s used to. If it made Bucky’s grin break out of her cheeks like that, this little home of theirs, Steve would boil potatoes in a tin can.

“It’ll do,” she says. “Rebecca, will you stay for dinner?”

Bucky goes out to pick up a bit of beef, something they can fancy up a bit with some garlic and pepper. They have a clutch of asparagus, probably the last of the season, and some rolls Rebecca brought straight from Mrs. Barnes. The only have two chairs, so they sit in a row on the sofa, plates on their knees.

Soon enough the plates are scraped empty and set aside, and Bucky has settled to the floor, elbow propped on Steve’s knee. Rebecca sits at the other end of the sofa, back against the armrest and legs crossed, skirt spread across her lap. It’s pretty, delicate flowers and buttons down the front, and Steve knows if she asked Rebecca would loan it to her. She’s spent enough time trying to teach Steve how to be a girl. Not cruelly; Steve knows that Rebecca thinks that while Bucky can’t change, can’t be anything but what she is, Steve might have it easier if she were a little less indeterminate. A little easier to pin down. As it is, most folks figure Steve’s a kid, what kind of girl doesn’t much matter. 

It probably would be easier, if only Steve knew what kind of girl she was. None of them quite seem to fit.

She does try. Her few friends are girls, and she likes all of Bucky’s sisters. There’s a part of her that would have been happy eating dinner at their table every night, bunking with Bucky in the little attic bedroom at the Barnes house, letting Susanna regale her with made-up stories, teaching Miriam how to draw. She knows Rebecca the best, after Bucky; they’d been in the same year at school after Steve lost a grade to pneumonia. 

Mrs. Barnes had offered, that first night after the wake. Damn near insisted, but Bucky was just as stubborn as her mother, and as soon as she found this apartment, they said goodbye to the Barnes homestead. Bucky needed to, so Steve did too.

“What do you think?” Bucky says, a little shy, in the wake of a quiet lull.

Rebecca glances around again. “Not so bad,” she concedes. “Maybe a bit more work.” She tucks her legs up, wraps her arms around her shins. Digs her heels into the sofa. She has a soft smile playing across her face, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Do you think –” she starts, and then stops. “Do you think someone like me could have this too?”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to get married someday, I do. But before that – I don’t know, it’d be nice to be on my own for a bit. Or with a friend,” she adds, wriggling her nose at Steve. “But you’re so – well, you never go the way you’re supposed to, do you? I don’t know if I’d be brave enough.”

Steve reaches out, touches Rebecca’s ankle awkwardly. “I’m not brave at all, and I’m here,” she says. And no one will ever marry her, she doesn’t say, so she needs to be able to get by.

Rebecca barks a loud laugh. “Steve, really? I don’t know if it’s stupidity or bravery, but I’ve seen the scrapes you get into. You’re a matched pair.” Steve flushes hot, but Rebecca’s grin holds nothing but fondness.

It gets dark before they know it, so Bucky goes downstairs to telephone the Barnes house so they won’t stay up worrying over Rebecca. They have just enough blankets to build her a nest on the sofa. In the morning, once they’re all awake, Bucky fries up eggs in their new pan, crispy around the edges and runny in the center. 

Bucky won’t stop grinning, even after she burns the toast.

++

It takes Steve a week before she can drop off easily at night. She doesn’t tell Bucky; there’s nothing she can do about it. Bucky sleeps like the dead – no snoring, hardly any movement at all – and the sounds through the walls are hardly different than she’s used to. But no footsteps late at night, no creaking door as Ma got home from a late shift and looked in on her. She keeps waiting for it to happen.

So: grief. 

She had cried, a few times over, at the funeral and later, in the attic bedroom at the Barnes house. Bucky didn’t know what to do with her, she could tell: stay quiet, pretend there’s some dignity in it, or crawl into the bed behind her and hold her tight and close. She has the barest memory of waking up to a sliver of sunrise, Bucky pressed against her like there’s glue spread between them. She’d blinked her eyes shut, and when she woke properly, Bucky was already off at work.

Like a ghost, she floated through the Barnes house, aimless, senseless. After three, four days, she’d come to feel Mrs. Barnes’s eyes on her, and knew they’d been there all along, watching; as soon as she made eye contact, Mrs. Barnes handed her a potato and a paring knife and told her to make herself useful. 

She looks up at the ceiling: light filtering in, an obtuse rhombus shifting up above her. Bucky’s even breath and her own, rasping. She’ll get used to it all, eventually, the new state of things. Eventually, she’ll sleep.

Now, she turns on her side and watches the whisper-rise of Bucky’s chest as she inhales.

++

Her only constants are Bucky and drawing, both at hand through school days spent in bed coughing, through long, immobile afternoons. Before the TB hit, Ma had set her up with classes at the Art Students League and, if the flu’s not too bad this winter, Steve thinks she can keep going regularly. The subway trip takes a while, but it gives her time to read: the newspaper, history books on the Great War – things are building in Europe, and she wants to know why – the mystery potboilers Bucky’s so fond of, and once or twice a romance paperback lent to her by Marcy, a gal in her painting class who finds them “an absolute gas.” They mostly leave her a bit flushed and let down, so she stops borrowing them after the first couple.

When Steve gets to the classroom that Tuesday, there’s just a note on the door saying class has been canceled today due to illness. She sits down on a bench in the hallway to catch her breath; it takes her forty-five minutes on the subway just to get to class, and now she’s got to turn around and head back. And she’d really been looking forward to working on her painting; she still isn’t quite used to leaving her work in the studio instead of carrying it around in her sketchbook, and each time she stands in front of it once more, it asks something new of her.

She likes it, though: thinking in color, thinking of something larger than a sketchbook balanced on her knee. When she told this to Marcy, she’d laughed and said Steve should try something even bigger. And she’s got a friend with a WPA commission for the new Bronx Post Office she said she’d put Steve in touch with. 

Thinking of her painting, half-done and waiting for her brush, she allows herself a brief moment of self-pity, and makes a note to use the hallway phone to call ahead to the university on Thursday before heading out, just to be sure Mr. Kent isn’t sick again. Then it’s up and to home once more.

She stops at the corner for some liver. Tuesdays and Thursdays they usually eat cold sandwiches for dinner, since she gets home so much later than Bucky. But today, with an extra two hours, she may as well treat them. 

The lights are out when she unlocks the door; Bucky must have gotten held up after work. She snaps the kitchen light on and dumps her satchel on the sofa, hauling out the wax-paper-wrapped parcel of liver. She’s unwrapping it when she hears a thump, then a groan, from the bedroom. 

She looks around her: there’s nothing good and heavy in the kitchen, nothing that could serve as a weapon except the big, old knife they used for everything from dicing carrots to jointing a chicken. Picking it up, she holds it to her side as she creeps to the bedroom door and, with her other hand, quietly pushes it open.

The creak gives her away, but she gets a good look before Bucky’s tumbling from the bed, grabbing the corner of the sheet to shove it on top of the other person in there with her. So she sees Bucky’s naked body, flushed pink and slick, and sees that the other person in bed is a gal, too, a tumble of red hair and sheet pulled up just enough to reveal the sloping curve of her chest.

“Steve – I didn’t think –” Bucky’s stepping toward her, still naked as a jaybird, and Steve shakes her head, backs away.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t –” She goes into the kitchen, sets the knife down, and leaves the apartment.

It’s a bit too chilly out, without her coat, and soon enough Steve is crossing her arms tight, tucking her hands up into her armpits. There’s nowhere for her to be going, not without any coins in her pocket. 

She walks toward the water. It’s pure instinct, really: no better place to clear your head than along the gusty, gritty shores of the East River. The air is hazy with smoke and diesel fumes, the roads busy with folks at the end of long commutes.

Her heart still beat-flutters, and she tells herself it’s the adrenaline of fear, and the exertion of walking quickly: natural bodily responses. 

It isn’t about the back of Bucky’s shoulders, gleaming with sweat, and the back of her neck, bent and bare like a supplicant. Her short-shorn hair mussed. Her eyes wide and frantic, and the dark tangle of hair between her thighs: like a shock to Steve’s whole nervous system. A moment, a great horrible moment, when something you know already slams into you, bodily, like a wave you haven’t quite braced enough for. 

Because of course Steve knew. It’s mostly fellas that get up to that sort of thing around here, and at the Art Students League, but she’s heard enough rumors about certain bars, about particular places. And those gals look a certain way, don’t they: Bucky’s short hair and men’s trousers, her job on the floor at the slaughterhouse when she could just as easily still be a clerk in the office. The way she walks, like she fully knows her body. Girls aren’t supposed to walk like that.

They’d been just alike when they were little, sure: a pair of tomboys. And Steve sure knows what it means to envy the boys their right to space, the way they whoop and holler and claim the back alleys and dead end streets for their own. She knows, too, what it’s like to like the look of a gal, pretty lipsticked mouths and long long lashes. To wonder at the softness of a big, full bosom like the girl in Bucky’s bed. It doesn’t mean anything, though, not once you’re grown up. 

Bucky takes up space: she can. But no one’s ever taken Steve seriously in trousers or in skirts, and even less when she puts her fists up, plants her feet, most of the time. 

She reaches the river, on the small green point under the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s murky and opaque, down below where she stands on the embankment and leans over the railing. It churns; so does her gut. She thinks she might vomit, but she doesn’t. 

There’s no reason for Bucky to be like this, she thinks. To be bringing home this – this person – 

They were just fine, everything was just fine.

Steve pounds her fist against the railing; the iron smarts against her knuckles. The air is damp; it might rain. Bucky’s mouth, wet and red. 

Maybe if she just – thinks of it. Of her. Thinks about what she saw and then lets it go.

Okay. Bucky’s broad sharp shoulders, her bent head, the sheet of her narrow bed rucked behind her knees – spread – her, her ass rocking forward, her hand. Her hand. Steve swallows. Okay. The girl – pale knees, falling open, and then later her shocked wide eyes, her red hair mussed, her breasts not quite covered. Her body full, and soft. 

She doesn’t think she shouted, or anything; Steve thinks she was silent. Scared, probably: Steve there with a knife in her hand like a lunatic. 

And Bucky had – what had Bucky said? She can’t remember. Only this: Bucky’s narrow naked body in front of her, worse than any punch she’s ever taken. 

There’s a bench behind her. She sits until the sun starts to fade, then goes home.

++

She doesn’t get down to the gym very much anymore, even though Bucky still goes once or twice most weeks. It smells the same – sweat, both sour and sharp – and just pushing the door open rattles Steve back to the summer of ’32, the year Bucky took it upon herself to make Steve into the world light flyweight champion, or at least teach her how to keep her hands up in a fight. It’s been about a year since she’s spent any time there, but it was always like this – no casual visit quite overshadowing that summer of afternoons sweaty and raw, her small fists lost in the gloves and bruised, inside them, from starting scrappy fights out in the rest of the world. The gym doesn’t allow girls as a matter of course, but Bucky learned at her Dad’s instruction, and he had just enough wins under his belt to convince the owner to let her in the ring.

It takes Steve’s eyes a moment to adjust, and she’s glad that she’s arrived when she has. Bucky’s already in the ring, gloves up and light on her toes, ready for the casual whistle that sets the skirmish in motion. The guy across from her throws the first punch, which she knocks away and follows up with one of her own. Bucky’s hair flops into her eyes, but she keeps her chin down. 

There’s always been an unexplainable sort of grace to the way Bucky holds her body, to the tightly tuned shifting of her muscles. Not feminine, not like the pictures might tell them a gal should move; in fact, the only thing that gives Bucky away in the gym is the white tee-shirt she wears on top of her shorts, which the guys usually go without. Even under it, she’s mostly angles, and she looks like all the rest when warming up at the punching bag, loose work shirt unbuttoned at the collar, sleeves rolled up. 

Bucky ducks away from another thrown punch; her shoulders roll; Steve wrenches her eyes away. She’s watched Bucky countless hours, thought she knew every movement of her body, but now the image of her bent head, her neck bare and wet, replaces all those she knew and sets her guts roiling. She keeps her eyes on the floor, waiting for Bucky to finish, but when she hears a sick crack and the thump of a body hitting the platform floor, her eyes wrench up, wildly, as she stumbles over her own deadweight feet to get to the edge of the ring. 

Rolling onto her side, Bucky catches sight of Steve. Her grin is slightly bloodied, but she gets to her feet quickly enough. Nodding to her opponent with good humor, she slips between the ropes and drops to the floor. 

Without precisely meaning to, Steve touches the corner of Bucky’s mouth, where it’s split, pushing her thumb against Bucky’s lip until she opens her mouth. Bucky’s breath slows. “Teeth still in?” Steve asks. She can see the tip of Bucky’s tongue as she probes around her jaw. She drops her hand.

Bucky nods. “In fighting shape,” she says. Steve lifts an eyebrow pointedly toward the guy she’d been fighting, who’s casually thumping a speed bag with one glove. “Ah, I had him on the ropes. If you hadn’t come in and distracted me –” she cuts herself off, looks away. A hot flush rises in Steve’s chest. “I just mean, I coulda taken him,” she finishes, to the floor.

She would have gotten back up, Steve knows. She always does. Watching her go down, though, that’s what made Steve stop coming here. 

Sliding her hands out of her gloves, Bucky flexes, examines her knuckles. She doesn’t ask why Steve is there, though she deserves to. The past three weeks, Steve’s spent most of her time trying very hard not to be in the same space as Bucky. Not an easy undertaking when home is hardly bigger than a breadbox. She knows Bucky’s hurt by it, would have to be damn near an idiot to miss the way Bucky looks at her when she’s not watching, sideways and cagey. 

It was a damn fool idea to come here, to see if she could look at Bucky somewhere that was worn a little less by their familiar daily footsteps, somewhere where the memories all live somewhere before her unexpected return, her hand on the doorknob, her eyes on Bucky’s bent head. It’s not any easier, not at all, and now Bucky’s looking at her like she’s totally strange to her, like she doesn’t know what Steve will do next.

She doesn’t; how could she? Steve doesn’t even know. 

Dragging her chin up, Steve looks at Bucky – looks – catches her eye and holds it. “Just wanted to see you,” she says. Bucky exhales.

She can’t quite watch Bucky clean up and change, but she sits on the bench in a quiet corner of the locker room – they’re mostly left alone there, after half-a-dozen years of Bucky holding her own in the ring – and talks to her. Not about anything, really, just the painting she’s working on, the appointment Marcy’s set up with her artist friend, the broadsheet she’d seen tacked up outside the classroom advertising a meeting of the American Student Union.

“You be careful with that,” Bucky says, nudging Steve’s ankle. 

“I’m just interested in what they have to say,” Steve says. Marcy and two other students, Clive and Samuel, had been arguing about it when she showed up to class earlier. After Samuel stomped off, pushing his easel to the far side of the classroom and blocking his view of the two of them, Clive and Marcy had tried to fill her in, telling her about the arguments that erupt at every meeting of the ASU of late about whether or not to change the official Union position on European rearmament. 

“We all marched together in ’35 in the Strike Against War,” Marcy had said. “Just some folks now have changed their minds, figuring peace isn’t good enough to work for.” If Samuel had noticed her glaring at him from around the corner of her canvas, he hadn’t shown it. 

“Do you think we’ll go to war?” she asks Bucky now. It’s another of the things they don’t really talk about. Bucky drops heavily to the bench beside her.

“Yeah,” she says simply. “If it gets bigger, I think we gotta.” Steve nods; she’d listened to Marcy’s lecture on pacifism and hadn’t disagreed, precisely, but she has learned to fight with her fists against fellas who won’t listen to anything else. 

“I thought so,” Steve says. The newspapers treat it like it’s some distant thing, the German military building itself up again, the stories of German and Austrian Jews humiliated in the streets, but even an ocean away, they can’t stay untouched, can they?

“I’d enlist,” Bucky says, quite suddenly, her exhaled breath punching the air. She stares up at Bucky, whose jaw is gritted together, firm, the bruising at the side of her mouth only serving to make her look more resolute. 

“You couldn’t,” she says, because of course she couldn’t. The world might be changing, but the Army still doesn’t take girls. 

Bucky drops her chin to her shoulder, looking at Steve. “I’d try,” she says, simply. Steve wants to ask how, but fears Bucky’s answer. She knows already: Bucky would plant her feet, would take up space, would convince whoever needed convincing that she was what they needed. All things that Steve can’t quite seem to do.

Bucky reaches one hand over to where Steve’s fists have knotted together, tight, on top of her skirt, and prods at her knuckles. “Not so tight,” she says. “Loosely, now, thumbs out,” the same words she repeated daily that summer, when Steve was twelve and full of anger at a world that wanted her to turn into something she couldn’t be. “Loose, thumbs out,” again and again until Steve remembered to keep one hand up by her jaw and to punch with her first knuckles, her strongest.

She loosens her hands. She remembers that it wasn’t just watching Bucky go down that soured the gym for her, it was the way she herself walked around with her fists always ready. Bursting. 

++

Though it’s a bright, clear day outside, inside the Post Office the air is a dim and damp, smelling of plaster. Her eyes take a moment to adjust: the murky surfaces around her settle into counters and teller windows, and against one wall a tall scaffolding is draped with canvas. Two figures stand at the top, in matching paint-stained coveralls, and argue.

One gesticulates widely, brandishing a paintbrush, and the other responds in more measured tones. 

“Um,” Steve says, not nearly loud enough, and then, “hello?”

The figures turn. One, a woman with her hair tucked up under a flat cap, peers down at him. “Yes?”

“I’m – I’m Steve. Rogers. I’m here to see Miss Bryson?”

She exhales – it’s hard to tell if it’s a laugh or a snort. “You’re Marcy’s friend,” she says, and Steve answers, “Yes!” a little too enthusiastically. 

Miss Bryson climbs down the ladder. Standing in front of Steve, she cocks her head. “When Marcy said Steve, I thought – well. I should know better, shouldn’t I?” Her handshake is firm; up close, she’s a bit older than Steve first reckoned, not quite yet forty. Older than Marcy, at any rate. “Call me Bernarda,” she says, “and that’s Ben up there.” He ignores her wave, looking intently at the sketched-in cartoon on the wall.

Leading Steve over to a table, Bernarda unrolls a sketch on newspaper. It’s only the barest hint of a composition, roughly drawn in figures and unfinished landscapes, but the line work is strong and the balance confident – bold, muscled figured fully inhabiting their frames, the landscape around them filling to mold to their forms. 

“Ever work in tempera, Steve?

“No, ma’am”

“Fresco?”

“No,” Steve says again, adding hopefully, “not yet, ma’am.”

“Bernarda,” she reminds her, in a tone of voice that suggests she won’t do so again. Steve bites her lip. 

“Well, you’ll learn,” she says. “Come on up.”

Steve does learn. Under the twin tutelage of Bernarda and Ben, she learns to fill in the cartoon as guided, to work in small sections of wet plaster, to blend her colors without muting them, to align her style with theirs. It’s hard to tell where Ben’s ideas end and Bernarda’s begin; in this project they move like one brush, though Steve will come to learn that they don’t always align so closely, and the works she’ll see later – Ben’s sprawl-lined lithographs, the supple figures of Bernarda’s illustrations – bear their individual hands. 

If she was a little bit awestruck at first, working under two artists whose names she knows from the art journals that get passed around the League, their amiability melts it away. In fact, she finds that in the post office, much of what she’s read takes on a new color, her daily brushstrokes adhering to the words of the Bauhaus and the Artists’ Union. 

The murals are of American resources and industry: cotton and wheat, weaving and steel, hydroelectric dams and fire-filled furnaces. The figures are as monumental as the industries they embody, hands as large as tractors, bodies full of prosperity, and the colors are drawn from the American soil, ochres and sepias and clay reds. 

Steve mostly works on filling in color, leaving the details for Ben and Bernarda, but they give her the arms and the side-turned face of a mechanic in one panel to complete. “It’s high up,” Ben says, “but don’t screw it up.” 

She gives the riveter a ropy, muscled forearm and a hint of Bucky’s jaw. She’ll think that’s swell, though Steve knows she’s not all that impressed with the social realism style. “Don’t have to be a giant to be great,” she’d said, when they saw some pictures of Rivera’s work in the newspaper. Steve can’t help but be drawn to the big, broad shoulders, to the capable hands, though. 

Ben paints in the words of Walt Whitman, words of sacrifice and change and a sly sort of irony. _To recast poems, churches, art, (Recast, maybe discard them, end them - maybe their work is done, who knows?)_ She’s read _Leaves of Grass_ already, but he gives her Bloomsbury. The next day, he tells her to ignore that whole lot and read Marx instead. Bernarda favors poetry and William Morris over Ben’s utopian manifestos, and lets Steve borrow freely from her library. She reads it all.

They’re the reason she gets a copy of the year’s most talked-about essay before it’s even published, Ben giving her a typed manuscript and telling her to share it around. It’s because he’s friends with Diego Rivera, one of the authors – something else she tries hard not to be star-struck about.

She tries to read it on the subway home, but doesn’t get much past the title before the crowd is pressed so closely she can’t hold it up. _Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art_ rings in her mind until she can get home and look at it properly. 

Everyone at the League talks about the impending war. Steve had, in the end, gone along to a couple of meetings of the American Students Union, but they usually degenerated into shouting before a half an hour was up, and she feels too much an interloper to participate, not a part of the Union’s history. But radical words get tossed around between classes, everyone an expert; Steve mostly stays quiet and listens. 

That night, she reads and re-reads the Manifesto, until Bucky rolls over in bed and says across the room, “You’re not going to solve the meaning of true art in one night. Turn out the damned light.” She does, but the words keep twisting. 

In New York, it’s hard not to think of art as eternal, as made to live long past them all. Just the tall columns of the Met, halfway between palace and cathedral, are enough to attest to the insignificance of a single human life. She’s not thought of her own work that way, not really, not until the strokes of her brush were locked into plaster, melding into the very fiber of the Post Office building. But Breton and Rivera write like art is meant to upend, to remake only after destroying. True art, they write, is unable _not_ to be revolutionary; those words quiver in Steve’s gut.

Ben asks her the next day what she thinks of the Manifesto. She’s still working it through in her head, but she says, “Seems a bit unfair to say that art should be completely free of restrictions,” she says. “What with us being paid by the federal government.”

Bernarda laughs heartily at that, says she has a point. It’s not that Steve doesn’t agree that art should be without – what did they write? – without orders from above. It’s just that she wonders if it’s better, instead, to be able to use one’s own judgement to decide to trust in orders, or not. 

She won’t quite settle on an opinion, even through the many heated discussions that take place at the League. What does she leave behind, if not the labors of her body and mind? What new world could she ever make?

Often, though, she aches too much to linger on such questions. It takes her a while to scrub the plaster and tempera paint off her hands each night, leaving them dry, her nails beds gritty with pigment. Her arms go numb after long hours vertical, tingling the whole subway ride home, and she has callouses on her middle finger and thumbs, tangible reminders of the paintbrush in her hands, of the plaster trowel. 

“You’re a real artist,” Bucky says to her one night, touching the tips of her fingers across the table, and it has a different inflection than the dozens of other times she’s said it, looking over Steve’s shoulder at a sketch. 

++

The plaster dries; the scaffolds come down. There will be an unveiling, celebrating the work of Ben and Bernarda, but for today the Post Office is theirs alone, as they clean up, boxing supplies and sweeping debris. Bernarda produces a flask of coffee, still tolerably warm, and pours them each a mug as they sit and catch their breath.

“The government’s looking for printmakers right now,” Ben says. “Posters and the like. If you want to learn, let me know.”

Steve nods. She wants to learn it all, yes, but she knows what Ben’s leaving unspoken: the kind of contribution a girl like her can make to the war effort, with artist’s hands and an invalid’s lungs. Posters, prints, propaganda. 

“And after – ” Bernarda starts, glancing at Ben. “This money won’t keep coming” she says finally. There was an unholy furor at Ben’s choice of poetry to immortalize on the murals – too prophetic, perhaps, or simply too hopeless. He’s had to paint it out and put in Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” instead, a much more anodyne effort on Whitman’s part, if you ask Steve. 

Steve spoons some sugar into her cup and waits for the question. “You have talent, you’ve got brains – what are you going to do with them?”

Looking down into her mug, Steve lets the question settle in her mind. It’s been a long time since she’s been able to answer that – when she was little, sure, there were all the silly and serious things a girl might want to be. But they got shunted off, one by one, by her dodgy legs or her stubborn lungs. What they’ve done here, these images that so many will see, thrills her, but she knows enough about the world to know that the chances of a painting career paying her well enough to live are small. 

The news from Europe presses in around them all. _To recast poems, churches, art (Recast maybe to discard them, end them)._ All the stuff they create to be eternal, bombed to rubble. What will they make in its place?

“I want to make a difference,” Steve says, finally, and Bernarda hums.

“Well,” she says, “we’ll keep working on that.” 

++

The bedsheets stick to her when she wakes up, damp and hot with sweat. This summer’ll be a scorcher. She sits up, waits for a moment to let her head clear. Her shirt is sticking to her and, she realizes with embarrassment, her underwear clinging. She sends up a tiny prayer of thanks that Bucky’s already up and out and stands.

She drags on her lightest dress – one that would make Mrs. Barnes narrow her eyes disapprovingly at her – and a clean pair of panties. Even without stockings, sweat already drips stickily down the backs of her thighs.

Bucky’s moving around in the kitchen, something cooking on the stove. She hasn’t dressed; the back of her undershirt is stained with a half-circle of sweat below her neck and clings to her lower back. Steve holds her breath. One beat, two: the muscles of Bucky’s shoulders shifting as she lifts the pan and flips something in it, her hips shifting as she leans to peek in the oven. Steve keeps her eyes resolutely above the waistband of Bucky’s underwear and walks out of the bedroom.

“Give up on clothing, did ya?”

Bucky turns, grin as wide as her face. Steve doesn’t look below her neck. In one hand, Bucky’s holding a spatula, and the pan still in the other. Pancakes: golden and fluffy. 

“Happy birthday, Miss America,” Bucky says, tipping the pan onto a plate. There’s a tin of syrup already on the table, and a slice of butter half-melted on a saucer. 

“That’s not my name,” she says, like she does every year. Since they were eight and ten, and Bucky had shown up on the fire escape, hoping Steve would steal away with her to see if they could catch some fireworks. 

She’d invited her in for cake, which, gosh, lit Bucky’s face up like she’d told her it was not just the Fourth of July but Christmas, too, and when she’d said it was because it was her birthday, Bucky’s mouth had screwed up a little funny, and she’d said, “Well happy birthday, then, Miss America,” and had lit a whole handful of firecrackers and dropped them in a tin can right there on the fire escape.

Ma had hauled Bucky right in through the window by the scruff of her neck, the firecrackers still going off like gangsters’ guns in the pictures. Bucky had yowled like a wet cat.

As if she’s remembering, too, Bucky rubs the back of her neck, grin slipping a little bit. Steve realizes, belatedly, that she hasn’t moved. “Thanks, Buck.” Her grin returns as she turns back to the stove, pouring out more batter. As Steve watches, her shoulders slip down a little, too, like she’s letting go of an unwanted weight; the movement, like a backwards shrug, makes something hot and guilty twist in Steve’s stomach. 

“These are real good, Buck,” she says, though she hasn’t even cut into them yet. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she knows she’s been holding back on telling Bucky what she really thinks lately, mind going a thousand directions at once these days. The thing’s she’s reading – what Ben gives her, what she sees in the newspaper – the things that have settled deep in her gut since that day she came home early, that she shoves down and away, the things that make her skin itch and her fingers restless: they’re all too much to say.

She pours some syrup on the pancakes, cuts some haphazard squares. They are real good.

Bucky joins her right as she’s finishing up the second one, and slides a third from her plate onto Steve’s. The protest Steve wants to make dies at Bucky’s glare, and besides, the short stack remaining on Bucky’s plate is still impressive. 

Sitting, Bucky cuts into her pancakes: she likes to eat them still in a stack, impossibly large bites that leave her mouth gleaming with butter. Steve swallows, looks down at her plate. 

“So,” Bucky says, swallowing down her last bite, “how’d you like an outing today?” She picks up an old pay envelope from the corner of the table and pushes it across the table. Steve takes it, flush of guilty pleasure suffusing her cheeks. Bucky always plans something for her birthday, as elaborate as she can afford, and Steve always feels like it’s too much to have and too much to refuse all at once.

Tipping the envelope into her hand, Steve slides out two tickets: today’s game, Dodgers versus Giants, at the Polo Grounds, and a couple of subway tokens. She feels her mouth drop.

“Really?”

Bucky’s grin could light up a whole city. “Get your cap on,” she says.

++

They’ve been to games at the Bathtub before, when the Dodgers play the Giants, but usually to the bluff overlooking the stadium, where if you stand up and pay attention you can just about follow what’s happening in the game. The bluff’s usually pretty crowded with working guys, and they can rarely get through the first inning without cracking some joke about gals out on a picnic. At the beginning of the game, neither team’s done enough to get anyone’s Irish up, so they can usually get by with some significant glares and a slightly-too-loud conversation on the game to prove their chops. 

Steve likes to hustle it out of there right when the games end, though.

But today, they’ve got actual tickets. The only thing that could make it more perfect would be if the Dodgers were at home, at Ebbets, not on the Giants’ turf. 

The subway ride up to Washington Heights is long, and hot, but Steve’s not even really paying attention to the sweat slowly trickling down the back of her neck as she watches the people around them. Everyone’s cheerful, the holiday overtaking irritation at the heat, and they’re all dressed for days out: straw hats, cheerful blouses, little boys in knock-knee shorts and girls in ruffled pinafores. Steve wears her old Dodgers cap, the one Bucky had bashfully wrapped up and given to her for her birthday half-a-dozen years ago, and tucked under her arm, Bucky carries her Dodgers pennant. 

The train is crowded, their shoulders bumping together with each turn. At one stop, Steve feels Bucky’s shoulders stiffen as she sits up straighter, and turns to see what’s caught her attention.

At the door, a group of men in Army uniforms stand. They have their backs to Steve, square shoulders presenting a unified front. Sweat makes her blouse cling wetly to her narrow, rattling chest, and she feels every inch of her too-skinny limbs and sloped shoulders, her fragile body.

Bucky’s watching them, too. Steve hears the wet sound of Bucky swallowing, then looking away. 

Khaki seems to be on every street corner these days: soldiers in uniform in the train, the bodega, the bookshop. At home, they talk about the news of the war in facts and figures, places, names; Steve brings home a newspaper each evening, an extravagance unheard of even a year ago, so they can each read and read again. Hitler, advancing: Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium. Paris, three weeks ago.

They had joked about visiting Paris, so Steve could visit the Louvre and sketch, so Bucky could visit the nightclubs and dance. The next day, Steve got in a fight with a guy at the market waving his handkerchief around and putting on a French accent. Bucky sponged the blood off her temple and didn’t even berate her.

Steve looks down at her hands until the soldiers get off, five stops before them. Clenched together, her fists are small, tight knots. 

++

The Dodgers win, six to one, and between them Bucky and Steve eat nine hot dogs. The subway ride home is loud and boisterous, filled with Brooklyners celebrating. Bucky pulls Steve out of the train at Fulton Street so they can walk home across the Brooklyn Bridge; Steve wonders at first if five hot dogs is one too many, but as they’re walking up the steps to get to the bridge, the first crack of fireworks rends the air. 

They burst high above the East River, sparkling reflections setting the world aflame. Pedestrians line the bridge walkway; some have even brought their own folding chairs, settling in comfortably for the show. Bucky finds them a spot where Steve can perch on the railing between the walkway and road, high enough to see, and steadies her with one arm looped casually around Steve’s calf. Her shoulder presses against Steve’s knee and in the bursts of light her gleaming dark hair shimmers like the night sky does, far outside of the city.

When she was eight, her mother took her upstate for one long week. She didn’t say, but Steve knew it was to help her lungs. She might have coughed less; she doesn’t remember. But the stars – the stars stay in her mind.

Spread across the wide-open sky like scattered glass, more stars than she thought could ever exist at once. Sometimes on a moonless night in Brooklyn, they can pick out a handful of bright stars, but when she got back and tried to explain to Bucky what it was like – what it was really like – in the heavens, Bucky had listened, hard, but Steve knew by the slight wrinkle in her brow that she didn’t quite believe it. 

Fireworks are nothing like stars: far too quick, much too fleeting. But Bucky, tonight, pleased and fond, pressing her cheek against Steve’s bare knee right there on the bridge, with anyone watching: she is bigger and brighter than any wide-spread celestial canopy. 

When the fireworks finish, with great almighty bangs, the folks on the bridge chatter excitedly as they begin to pack up, ready to wander to houses, or maybe to bars, to take with them the bright magic of the night, already fading into smoke. Raising a hand, Bucky helps Steve jump down, and doesn’t object when Steve tucks her hand into the crook of Bucky’s elbow. She doesn’t even let go as they walk toward home, and Steve knows she should let go, but instead allows herself Bucky’s indulgence as the marker on another passing year.

++

The WPA money comes in trickles and starts – a muralist needing an assistant here, a poster there. It’s no way to live, especially not with the rumors coming in that money’s being shifted away from the arts as war industry builds. “What need is there for things of beauty and truth when there are guns to be made?” Bernarda says bitterly one night at the studio she shares with Ben. They’ve had a bit to drink, and Bernarda is expansively advising Steve to take up photography because the war effort will need that.

Steve believes her; she’s felt the truth of Ben’s images of the South, or his friend Walker’s of the Dust Bowl. But she can’t quite imagine the feeling of a machine in her hand instead of a pencil or brush.

She doesn’t quite give up on her art, but – as she says to Bucky – like so many flat-broke artists before her, she gets a job to pay the day-to-day. Bucky protests; she’s supervisor at the slaughterhouse now, and makes fair pay, but Steve won’t be kept by her.

Besides, at the end of the day at the bakery, she gets to bring home misshapen loaves of bread, only a little stale, and that’s more than she can say of any day painting murals. 

The mornings are early, but in the chill of the fog the warmth of the ovens is welcome. The tickle in her throat is easy to suppress. It might grow into something, it might not; Steve has enough experience to know that worrying over it won’t change the outcome. So she clears her throat, forcing the cough down, and finishes counting out Mrs. Klein’s dozen rye rolls. With her thumb, she holds down the twine to tie the box shut; she’s not quite as deft at it as Mrs. Hubert or her daughter, but at least she doesn’t leave the twine in knots anymore.

She makes change, she slices pie, she washes dishes. Mrs. Hubert likes her because she doesn’t flirt with the boys from the Navy Yard and the housewives like her because what she doesn’t have in speed she makes up for in politeness and a willingness to listen to gossip. Mrs. Hubert does all the baking herself, but after Steve re-arranged the pie case during a lull, she lets her do all the displays. They’re humble offerings, the pies, cakes, breads, and rolls she stacks up – nothing like what she imagines a French patisserie might be filled with, macarons and eclairs and confections in all colors, and not even like what the Italian bakeries fill their windows with – but with a bit of bright paper and nice white china they look a treat. 

It’s also close enough to the slaughterhouse that Bucky can stop by at lunch sometimes. Not every day – they don’t make enough to afford a daily treat and Steve wouldn’t dare give her something for free, not even the broken pieces she is allowed to take with her at the end of the day. Once a week or so, with some of the fellas from the slaughterhouse or the warehouses around, she’ll come in and say, “Well, Stevie, what’s good today?”

She doesn’t know if Bucky even notices the flirt that creeps into her own voice when she’s around the guys – bravado and a too-wide grin. It puts Steve a little on edge, now, the way Bucky leans over the case to peer at the eclairs and then looks back up at Steve, lip caught in her teeth, to say, “Tell me about the cream in these eclairs, Stevie.”

Stevie, always, like she’s her gal. Steve doesn’t indulge her. 

But if she did: “It’s real good, Buck,” she’d say, drawing it out a little. Or: “What you really want today is a slice of this lemon tart. Sweet and sharp.”

Bucky would say something like, “Aw, Steve, you know what I like,” low and fond, like it means something, and the words would lodge themselves somewhere south of Steve’s stomach.

Today, it’s slow, the drizzle outside keeping folks in. Steve assembles boxes, doodling on the corners: a frilly cake, twisted sweet rolls, a slice of toast with a pat of butter. After each customer comes and goes, dripping water on the tile off of rain slickers and umbrellas, Steve runs a mop over the floor lackadaisically. 

The hollow of her throat threatens to feel sore, the changing weather often setting it off, but she refuses it, imagines honey coating the tickling interiors, soothing and warm. While the bread dough rises, Mrs. Hubert pours them both a cup of coffee and lets Steve sit. In all these slow moments, Steve feels not the monotony of her past – hours spent in bed, bored and angry at her fragile body – but the bated breath before a fight, in those moments when some sneering bully is making up his mind to hit a girl or spit another insult and ignore her.

She can’t keep still. These days, seems like no one can.

++

There are times when Steve aches for a weekend all to herself, or just with Bucky, quiet enough to sit around the apartment and listen to the radio, to have a beer and sketch, to wear her pajamas for a whole day. Unfortunately, the bakery’s the busiest on Saturday, and the rest of the weekend is given over to higher powers: the Catholic Church and Mrs. Barnes.

They get out most Fridays to the Barnes house for Shabbat, staying long enough to eat and be fussed over before getting home. It feel like habit, now, after walking home from school once a week with Bucky – nuns and catechism, and Bucky sour-mouthed and smart, still not quite reconciled to the two inherited halves of her genealogy. Even now, Mr. Barnes is a Christmas Eve and Easter Catholic, and Bucky thinks that her Ma mostly keeps Shabbat up to get all the girls under one roof at least a few times a month.

Steve’s got to be up at dawn on Saturdays and is always more than ready to sleep after Mrs. Barnes’s generous Shabbat spread, but Bucky will sometimes go out, falling back into bed in the small hours, her rustling not-quite-waking Steve. The stale smell of smoke and beer and perfume lingers, ghostly, in the mornings when Steve wakes first, before Bucky’s had a chance to bathe.

Sunday morning’s Mass; Bucky doesn’t go much anymore, just on occasion to get her fill of incense and eternal damnation, she says. Steve thinks it’s still a comfort, the Latin and the hymns, and when it’s not she tries to think of it as a reminder – to do better. 

“Eternal soul taken care of?” Bucky says from the sofa as Steve makes her way inside, taking off her hat. 

“’Spose so,” Steve says. The homily was on Psalm 82, and had kicked up a not-insignificant amount of murmuring in the pews. _How long will you judge unjustly: and accept the persons of the wicked? Judge for the needy and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy._ It’s getting cold outside, December chill starting to roll in, and the newsreels from the depths of last winter still haunt Steve. Nightly bombs on London; the frozen mud of trenches, littered with horses dropped down dead; the threat of frostbite on top of gangrene. Steve knits on the train to the League, producing competent-but-not-skillful hats and mittens to send to the front. Very little in the world feels just.

Dropping her coat over one of the chairs, Steve goes into the bedroom to change into trousers and a sweater, and when she comes out, Bucky’s got bowls of soup for both of them on the table and is fiddling with the radio.

It’s not quite a full weekend, but a long, peaceful afternoon will do. 

They’re tangled on the sofa, Bucky leaning against one arm, book laconically held in one hand, eyes half-lowered and pages unturned, and Steve against the other, sketching the loose, sleepy curve of her mouth, when the song on the radio abruptly cuts off in a crackle. Bucky jolts awake, half-formed question on her mouth, as the announcer comes on.

_“We interrupt this program for a special news bulletin. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by air, President Roosevelt has just announced.”_

The details continue. Bucky’s book clatters to the floor. Steve barely hears the announcer, just a buzzing in her ears. Her pencil skids across the page; she drops it. The words _declaration of war_ make it to her consciousness, and she feels her stomach turn. Across from her, Bucky stares, blank-eyed and pale. 

The announcer repeats himself – _The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor_ – and Bucky jerks to her feet, turning the radio down. They can hear enough to know when new details come in. She stands, one hand hovering over the radio; her chest heaves like she’s just run up the stairs. Her eyes are wide open, wild edges of the whites showing. Steve’s chest hurts. 

“Well,” Bucky says. Steve nods. Against the buzz of the radio, her mind drifts back to the homily at Mass today. _I have said: You are gods and all of you the sons of the most High. But you like men shall die._

++

Fellas they know start signing up. Bucky’s working longer hours than ever at the slaughterhouse, as her co-workers dwindle. Steve lingers walking past the Federal Building on her way home each day, staring up at the signs declaring the newly-opened presence of a recruitment station. The men in the posters are bursting and fresh-faced, striding with purpose. She bends her shoulders to the rain and walks home.

“How does it work?” she asks Bucky, who knows more men than she does, or at least more men of fighting age and inclination. Bucky looks up at her, across the table, and with her confused expression Steve realizes she’s been assuming that their thoughts align, and that perhaps Bucky has other things to be thinking of.

So: “Joining up,” she clarifies; Bucky’s brow furrows.

“Steve –”

“Just, just tell me. The guys must talk about it.” Bucky peers at her for a moment, then her expression clears.

“Sounds like a lotta paperwork,” she says, not casually enough. “Fingerprints, medical examination.” Steve tries to keep her expression schooled when Bucky looks up at her. 

“You’re gonna try,” Steve says. Bucky looks at her hands. _Oh._ “You already have.” 

“They won’t take girls,” she says, “and they’re not there to be fooled.”

“But –”

“Goddamn it, Steve!” Bucky slaps the flat of her hand against the table; Steve jerks. “What do you want me to say?”

She’s breathing hard, chest heaving up and down. Steve’s heart thuds against her ribs; she feels drawn out, taut. “That you want it. As much as I do, maybe more. To go – to help – to –”

“It’s not a back alley, Steve, it’s war. It would chew you up and break you and you can’t – you can’t –”

“But you can?” She’ll try again, Steve knows she will, and she just needs a lucky break: an inattentive doctor, or one who’s rushed, or to fall through the cracks. What’s more, Steve hates her a little for it. Hates that she knows Bucky’s body, can picture it so harsh and clear and correct in a uniform, sharp enough that no one would suspect, that Bucky has all the strength and the health that Steve will never have. “I can take care of myself,” she says, weakly, and Bucky just looks at her, looks at her hard.

“Don’t do it, Steve,” she says, low. “Stay here, at home, where I can – so I can –”

“What?” Steve asks. Her voice breaks. “What?”

Bucky shoves her chair back, stands. Her back is to Steve when she finally says, “So I can know you’re safe.”

Steve doesn’t want to be _safe._ She wants the itch crawling in her veins to burst out, wants to do something that isn’t just reading words and making pictures. The world needs action, and she thinks she’d trade immortality for something immediate to do. “I can’t be safe if the world isn’t,” she says, instead of what she wants to say, which is _I’m not fragile, and I need someone to see me and know that._

Bucky’s fist clenches on empty air. “Fine,” she says, voice tight. “I need air.” Grabbing her jacket, Bucky leaves, the door closing behind her with a loud, familiar thud. 

++

Bucky’s already got her jacket dangling off one arm and the top three buttons of her shirt undone when she pushes open the door after work a couple weeks later. Over the top of the sofa, Steve glances up at her noisy entrance, and watches as she drops her jacket and tugs open the rest of the buttons on her shirt, peeling it off as she walks toward the bedroom, shouting excitedly at Steve.

“Get up, come on, get dressed!” She’s grinning. Steve’s missed it, Bucky’s grin: since the news of Pearl Harbor cracked across the radio waves, Bucky has been grim, serious. There’s a lot they don’t say to each other.

Steve sets her sketchbook down on the floor. Bucky ducks her head back out of the bedroom door to see if she’s moved. Her face is streaked with the muck of the slaughterhouse, but everything below her neck is pale and clean and naked. Steve looks at her little, white breasts and swallows.

“I said get up!” Bucky rubs a wet cloth over her face, pink skin emerging from under the muck.

“I’m doing it,” Steve responds. Buck ducks back into the bedroom; Steve hears her shove some hangers across the closet bar. “What’s all the rush?”

“We’re going out,” Bucky answers, voice slightly muffled. 

“Where?”

Bucky leans around the corner of the doorframe, white shirt loose around her shoulders, and throws Steve’s pink dress at her. “To the future.”

++

The Stark exposition is packed with crowds, the walkways deep enough with people that Steve can barely see where she’s going. Bucky grasps her hand, pulling her forward, and manages to elbow them a place right up by the stage. She’s bought Steve a popcorn and a soda; Steve’s stomach rumbles unhappily, but she still eats, unable to stand the thought of Bucky’s broad, delighted grin turning to concern. 

Steve’s caught her staring at recruitment ads more than once, hands balled into fists. She doesn’t need to ask what Bucky’s feeling: a frenetic, urgent need to act, cut through with the resentment that no army wants either of them. 

Most of Brooklyn industry is already shifting into war production; Bucky will have a job as long as the war continues. Steve knows enough about nursing from her Ma to know that the last thing any hospital needs is a nurse likely to succumb to every illness that comes her way, and she’s hardly strong enough to be taken up by any of the factories. She doesn’t have the gams for the USO, which basically leaves collecting scrap metal with the kids. The look that Bucky gets when she sees a soldier walk by in uniform twists hard somewhere in her gut.

Up on stage, there’s a passel of gals dancing in very short skirts and sparkling lights flashing on and off around a shiny car. Bucky leans down to her ear and whispers, “Worth it just for the girls,” and gives a broad wink when Steve turns, a little shocked. 

They don’t talk about it: Bucky doesn’t say where she’s going when she spends the night out, and for a while Steve was real careful to announce her presence if she came home unexpectedly. She could have forgotten about it, she thinks, if she were a better person. Two years now, and the shifting roll of Bucky’s shoulders, the shallow rise of her breasts, the dark shadow between her legs – it all still rises, unbidden, in her head.

But they don’t talk about it; Bucky’s broken some tenuous pact they silently made, and in the space of time it takes Bucky to turn back to watch the dancing girls again, Steve feels an old tautness shatter across her shoulders.

In front of them, Howard Stark is explaining his newest invention; Steve looks down at her hand, close to Bucky’s, and wonders what it would be like to take it just now. But then there’s a rumble, and Stark’s car is pushing off from the ground, and Bucky’s lifting her hands to clap and whistle. 

Wouldn’t it be a wonder if Stark’s flying car did work? Steve thinks of the comics they all passed around as kids – superheroes and magic machines. Stark’s car falls to the stage, though, and the only magic is the way his grin charms the crowd again despite his failure. Her gut twists: disappointment. 

Bucky’s still hungry, chatting excitedly about hot dogs and ice cream. “Yeah, Buck,” Steve says, distractedly. “Bring me a cone, will ya? I’m just going to sit for a minute.” She gestures to a bench. Bucky’s eyes immediately go soft with concern. “Stop,” Steve protests. “Just warm in there, is all. You want to split a lemonade, too?” Bucky narrows her eyes, but leaves after wringing a promise out of Steve to sit right there until she gets back.

Steve feels a little guilty, taking advantage of Bucky’s concern. There’s something she’s got to do.

The American flag flying outside the recruitment office is longer than Steve is tall. They’ve been popping up at events everywhere, and each time Steve passes one she screws up the courage to go inside. Hell, at least it gives the recruitment officers something to laugh about.

Inside, there’s a mirror that shows your face in uniform, sharp shoulders and smart cap. The tip of her head doesn’t even reach the mirror’s chin. The shoulders are broader and squarer than hers will ever be. Even when she slips Bucky’s work jacket on to run down to the bodega, the crisp duck cloth deflates over the sad slope of her shoulders, and today, in a pale pink dress that doesn’t at all suit her coloring, she looks not girlishly slim but frail.

A tickle rises in her throat; she refuses it.

A group of men walk in, bravado pouring off of them with the stink of beer. One of them jostles another, sends him stumbling into Steve. 

“Sorry, girlie,” he says, eyes looking right past her. He joins back up with his friends, all boisterous razzing, and Steve’s left alone in the room again.

She looks at the mirror. The weight of the uniform – wool, and silver buttons, sharp-peaked cap and boots far heavier than any she’s ever worn – what would it be like, settled on her frame? All that straight-backed sense of purpose. She pushes her shoulders back, shoves her chin up. 

She cannot see herself.

The excited hustle of the crowd filters in through the opening of the tent. Bucky will find her soon, probably, force her onto the roller coaster. She’ll let Steve grip her hand tight as it peaks and rolls over the top, though, will hold onto her while Steve feels herself go weightless. Heck, she’ll even hold her hair back if Steve gets sick after and pukes up the popcorn they ate at Stark’s show. 

In the meantime, though: she turns on her heel and marches right straight up to the desk. A blonde girl in a USO uniform looks up at her, face placid and open. “Can I help you, sweetheart?” Her voice is candy-sweet and pitying; she thinks, like the man who bumped into her, that she’s a child, not a grown woman of twenty-two. 

“I want to enlist.”

The woman’s brows crinkle, a single mar on her pressed-powder-smooth face. “As what?” she asks, clearly humoring her.

“A soldier,” Steve says. “I’m not a child; I’m of age.”

The woman blinks. Steve wonders if she’s practiced that expression, so docile and artless. “The army doesn’t take girls,” she says, slowly, like Steve’s dumb.

“Sure, but there’s gotta be something. They want everyone, don’t they? Everyone who can fight.”

Blink. Another. She’s there to charm and cajole, to gather men up and make them feel good about it. Her training doesn’t extend to Steve, and Steve feels almost a bit sorry for a moment. 

“No,” she says. “They want the _men_ who can fight.” A bit more steely now; she’s catching on that Steve’s not a silly child. 

“But it’s –” Steve’s not sure what she’s gonna say: not fair, not right, stupid? She bites down on her uncertain words. 

She remembers the summer she became a _girl_. The summer when the boys at school stopped fighting her, not because she was small – puny, shrimpy, pipsqueak – but because she was a girl and therefore off limits. Before that, playground disagreements had been settled by a wrestle, and bullies stood up to with small, clenched fists. Bucky had shown her how to hold them – loose, thumbs on the outside – and how to protect her face. 

“It’s a war, honey,” the woman says. “You do your part here at home.”

“But I can _fight,_ ” she says, aware that her voice is turning toward strident. 

That same summer, she had been shunned from the games of ball played in the dead-end streets around Bucky’s house. Steve hadn’t been _good_ , not ever, but she could hit the ball unpredictably enough that it kept everyone on their toes. Bucky got a reprieve, even though she was older; but then, she had a cruel curveball. She stopped playing at the end of that summer, too, though, and they didn’t really talk about it.

“Listen –” the woman says, voice tilting up a pitch, and then a man steps around the corner, leans down and murmurs something to her. She straightens her back, clearly unimpressed, but gives a curt nod.

“Come with me,” the man says, and turns without watching to see if Steve will follow. She does.

Inside the exam room, the man closes the door and says, back to Steve, “The United States Army doesn’t accept women.” An accent tinges his words. 

“I know, I just –”

“You want to fight.”

“Yes.” 

“You want to kill Nazis?” he asks, and Steve finally places his accent. German.

“I don’t _want_ to kill anyone,” she says carefully. “I just don’t like bullies.” Her hands, in fists. Loose; thumbs on the outside. She takes a deep breath. “There are men laying down their lives. I don’t deserve to do any less.”

He looks her up and down. He’s not much taller than her, grey around the temples. “My name is Dr. Erskine,” he says, finally. “I want you to fill out this medical history form, and then I want you to leave. If you lie, I will throw it away.” He pushes three sheets of paper to her, and leaves.

Steve picks up the pen.

Outside once more, she doesn’t even notice Bucky until she’s crashing into Steve, throwing her arm over her shoulders and nearly knocking them both over. “Ya having fun, Steve?” Her voice is a shade too serious. In one hand she holds a pair of ice cream cones, already dripping down into her palm. 

Steve looks up at Bucky quickly, then back down. Bucky’s mouth is tight, and she’s looking off into the distance like she’s knows there’s something out there, but doesn’t want to know. All she’d said, the end of that summer when she was fourteen and Steve eleven, was, “Getting kinda tired of the same old ball game all summer long, anyway.”

Steve takes one of the cones – sticky, and cold – and says, “Yeah, Buck.”

++

They’re quiet on the ride home. The car around them isn’t: they’re far from the only ones who visited Stark’s expo, and it’s abuzz with excited chatter. The air smells like grease, sweat, and sugar. 

The litany of her insignificant body pounds through her head. She hasn’t seen it written down like that in a while – Ma always handled her medical forms, and Steve avoids thinking about her sundry ailments as a collective. A ‘flu here, a touch of rickets there, a spot of polio. Asthma, nosebleeds, summer colds, winter colds. Chicken pox and measles, and for those she still bears the scars, small white bumps on her stomach, under her chin, on the back of her knee. 

She can pretend, but the truth of the whole matter is: the Army would never take her, even if she weren’t a girl.

When they get back home, Bucky takes a bundle out from under her bed, brings it to the sofa where Steve sits, unties it. Boots – gleaming black leather – khaki – glinting buttons. She leaves the pile on her lap, like it explains it all. 

“I joined up,” she says, into Steve’s long silence.

“Joined _what?_ ” Steve says, stupidly, because the only thing Bucky can mean is impossible. All the recruitment centers, all of them, said the same thing.

Bucky shakes her head, doesn’t apologize. Steve’s hands are shaking, gripped tight in little fists. 

“How?” She lifts the uniform, holds it in front of her. Trousers.

Bucky says, “I found a doctor,” and doesn’t add anything else, no hints. It’s not the first time Bucky’s tried to protect her. She pushes the uniform off her lap, into a pile on the sofa. Limp, empty. 

“I’ll be fine,” Bucky says, a blatant lie. Something inside Steve cramps, hard, twists around in her gut. Bucky grabs Steve’s wrist, tight enough to grind the bones, and leans to her.

“I’ll come back to you, Steve,” she says, face so close to Steve’s she thinks she might kiss her. Steve grits her teeth together, pulls back. The thing in her gut coils tighter. Fear, she thinks, or jealousy?

“You’d better,” she says, fiercely. Bucky did this without her, did this alone; she has no right. Bucky’s looking at her like she’s punched her in the mouth. She kind of wants to.

“You’re stuck with me,” Bucky says, finally. “I’m with you ‘til the end of the line.” Her eyes are wide, dark. Steve stands up, walks to the window.

“Don’t get killed,” she says, finally. She thinks, _I hate you._

Bucky leaves before Steve’s awake.

++

Bucky’s been gone two weeks when Steve gets a letter with orders to report to Camp Lehigh. _Strictly confidential._

The camp’s all the way in Jersey, and Steve can hear Bucky’s absent voice in her ear saying _Jersey? I knew you’d go to any length to join up, but Jersey’s a step too far._ The bus ride is interminable and crowded; there are a couple of soldiers headed out to camp, too, already in their dress uniforms like the one Bucky had put on Steve’s lap.

Steve wears her only suit, navy worsted serge and only a touch too big. It’s a few years out of date, the skirt just a touch too long, the jacket more square than fitted – it was her Ma’s – but well-tended, and it’s the closest thing she has to a uniform. She hopes her flat-heeled loafers suggest dependability, rather than conjure images of children in school uniforms, and that she doesn’t do something horribly embarrassing like pop a suspender clip when crossing her legs. Better not cross her legs at all, on second thought.

The bus only takes her to the end of the long drive leading up to the guarded gates; the walk is the longest of her life. She falls behind the men heading up to camp, lets them put distance between them. Before rounding the corner to the gates, she wipes her forehead and the back of her neck with her handkerchief, dabbing away the mid-July sweat, and shoves another hairpin into the low roll she’s managed at the back of her head. She doesn’t know how many evenings Rebecca spent when they were teenagers trying to teach her to do something with her fine, slippery hair, but very little of it stuck.

The letter hadn’t said much of anything, just to report to Dr. Erskine. The soldiers at the gate look at her, then the letter, then her again; she can tell they don’t know anything more than she does, but nonetheless hold her there for a solid five minutes asking questions – where she’s from, what she does, if she’s got a sweetheart – before letting her through and pointing, in a desultory fashion, in the direction of Erskine’s offices.

It takes three tries before she finds the right building, but when she does, she’s admitted by, of all things, a woman in a sharp uniform and a burgundy slash of lipstick, taller than Steve by only an inch or two, who spares her a furrowed glance away from the file in her hand. At Steve’s hesitant request for Dr. Erskine’s office, she waves toward a room off to the side and steps away before Steve’s got a chance to thank her. 

“Siobhan Rogers,” Erskine says, before Steve has a chance to knock on the cracked-open door. “Come in.” 

He’s sitting behind a sparse metal desk, the kind Steve will come to associate with the army. Practical, a bit rusted. There’s an empty chair in front of it; Steve sits, at his gesture, and tries not to feel like she’s in an interrogation. She tucks her ankles underneath her, doesn’t cross her legs.

“Welcome,” Erskine says. 

“Sir,” she says warily. Erskine waves the title off. 

“I am sure you’re eager to get started,” he says.

She blinks. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”

Erskine shrugs, elaborately, leaning back into his chair. “You’re here to train,” he says. “I’m not in charge of that, so I cannot tell you what that will mean. As for why you’re here –” he spreads his hands out, palms up – “call it an old man’s whim.”

A flare of anger shoots up Steve’s chest, but she tries not to let it show when she says, “I’m not here to be a plaything.”

Erskine tilts his head, examines her mildly. “I did not say you were,” he says. “What you are is a temporary recruit on a top secret project. My project.”

Top secret? “I –”

“I can’t tell you more, or, I won’t tell you more, let’s say. None of the men with whom you’ll train know any more than that, either.”

“Men,” she says, confirming with herself as much as with him.

“Yes, of course. Soldiers.” She hadn’t really thought – well, no, she had thought an awful lot about what this might be, her strictly confidential summons to a military camp in New Jersey. Maybe they were forming a women’s corps after all, she thought. 

“And we’ll all be training for the same –”

Erskine shrugs. “More or less.” He pauses, seeming to consider her, tapping the index fingers of his interlaced hands against his mouth. Letting out a breath, like he’s decided something, he starts again. “We are trying to fill one very particular position. Colonel Phillips and I have been identifying possible candidates across the United States and brought them here.” She blinks. The knowledge settles in a rush, the fact that she might go through all of this – whatever _this_ is going to be – without even getting to _do_ anything else in the end. 

He notices, but perhaps misinterprets her trepidation. “The men will be told that you are an experimental test subject here on a related project. None of them know fully that we are looking for one right candidate, but they will all suspect competition sooner or later.” Okay, so. If she’s being very honest, she doesn’t think there’s much chance for her to show up fully grown men in their peak, but nonetheless it’s slightly irking that they’ve decided to give her a built-in excuse not to.

Erskine eyes her; if he sees her annoyance he chooses not to acknowledge it. “We’ll speak again,” he says, and dismisses her to find her barracks. 

++

Training is harder than anything Steve’s ever done. The days leave her wheezing, chest tight like the winter of ‘37’s pneumonia. She hasn’t yet kept up with the men, not even the smallest, and drags her feet in at the end of each day’s run well after the mess has finished serving. She hates that she’s proving them all right, even herself.

She won’t make it, and she can’t stand to feel the pitying eyes of everyone who knows that: Agent Carter, General Phillips, every goddamn man she runs behind. After the first week, the men had mostly stopped cracking sexual jokes at her expense, and all but a few have given up on sabotaging her attempts to keep up with well-placed kicks and ropes left just out of her reach. She knows it has nothing to do with grudging respect and everything to do with embarrassment at the pitiful sight she offers. She’s seen it in enough bullies’ eyes as they back away from her small fists.

She takes off her boots, stows them below her cot. No energy to polish them, even though they have mud caked around the edges of the soles. When she peels off her socks, her feet bleed in a dozen places; her hands aren’t much better. 

Bucky’s training is probably over by now. She hasn’t received a letter in two weeks, but she also hasn’t written to tell Bucky where she is, and it takes them a while to work their way to the camp from Brooklyn via Mrs. Engels next door to their old apartment. Was it this hard for Bucky? It couldn’t have been; Bucky was already strong, the strongest gal Steve knows. She tells herself that – _the strongest gal I know_ – again and again, to keep herself from thinking about what the army will do to Bucky if she’s found out. About what the men, the type of men she must be around just like Steve is, would do.

She lies back on the cot and closes her eyes. She doesn’t sleep.

In the morning, it’s another eight mile run. Her feet are numb before they reach the halfway point and Sergeant Duffy points to the top of the flagpole. For a long minute, she’s only concerned with catching her breath, bent double with palms on her knees, as the men scramble over each other, only to make it barely a third of the way up the flagpole. No one will get up there like that, Steve knows: brute strength can’t beat gravity and lack of friction. 

Sergeant Duffy shouts, and the men fall back into formation. Steve looks up at the flag one last time, wistfully. Now that she’s standing still, her feet throb, too big for her boots. Sergeant Duffy shouts something at her, and her eyes drop; he shouts again, and she peers at the flagpole and thinks _of course._

It falls with a great, heavy thud; satisfying. It’s all Steve can do not to trip over her aching feet as she climbs into the jeep. She thinks she might appreciate Agent Carter’s grin a little more in her memory than she can now, gritty eyed and soaking with sweat, so she tries to hold it in her mind.

Things start to change after that. Steve’s not getting any better at running, and she can only do a total of five pushups now instead of none, but General Phillips starts to give them exercises that rely a little more on the head than the body: puzzles to work out, obstacle courses that can only be beat by working together, not alone. No one really wants to listen to her, but she butts her way in, and by the third failed attempt at the relay course, one guy – Nelson – says, “For fuck’s sake, let’s try it Rogers’s way.”

It works. Hodge gets the flag, but they all make it across.

She can feel General Phillips’s eyes on her at the end of the course, before he dismisses them. 

++

Three weeks in, Agent Carter pulls her aside right after morning sprints and leads her to an open space behind the kitchens. Steve follows, breathing hard, and almost knocks into her back when she stops short. 

“So,” she says, turning to look at Steve. She’s very, very close; Steve keeps her eyes somewhere around Agent Carter’s chin. “I know you can run –” she gives a little gesture that Steve interprets as _after a fashion_ – “and you at least know what a push-up is. Can you fight?”

Steve stares at her. This is the most attention Agent Carter has given her since that one fleeting smile when Steve got the flag. “I, um,” she says. Instead of answering, she rocks back on one heel, stabilizing her frame, and holds up her hands, fists loose. 

A hum – of approval, of unease? Agent Carter bats one hand against Steve’s fist, watches as Steve rolls away from the movement and brings her hand back up. She circles Steve, examines her stance. “Who taught you?”

“My, um. A friend. Bucky.” She’s not really sure why just saying Bucky’s name clenches her gut like that, hard. 

“This Bucky any good?”

“Welterweight champion, at our gym.” She is a little proud of that, of Bucky, and thinks it might show in her voice. Agent Carter hums again.

“That’s all well and good,” she says, “but fighting – real fighting – is more than boxing. For the final weeks of your training, you’ll meet with me two hours a day to spar.”

Anger wells up in her blood. “Due respect, ma’am, but I don’t mind sparring with the men.” Only a few of them will even hit her, and they all pull their punches. She doesn’t, but she still loses most of the time. She can feel herself getting better, though.

“It wasn’t a request, Rogers,” Agent Carter says, though mildly. 

“Ma’am.” She grits her teeth down; she knows very well the unusual circumstances that got her here. Having special treatment on top of it, and taking Agent Carter away from her other duties, is too much.

She’s sure Agent Carter notices the dissatisfaction in her voice. “You’ll get there, soon enough,” Agent Carter says. “But the things Duffy will teach the men won’t quite do for you. When you’re small, you need to work differently.” 

Steve frowns. She knows that, sure, knows to use the strength of her opponent against himself and all that. Agent Carter explains, “When you’re defending yourself, make yourself small. Learn what can be done from a distance and what can be done close up. Make use of everything – anything you can hold in your hand can be a weapon. Surprise them.” Steve’s hands are still up, getting a bit sore. With a sudden snap, Agent Carter slaps one of them to the side, looking pleased when Steve jerks it back into place.

“Let’s go,” she says.

++

If she was tired before, two hours’ sparring with Agent Carter each day leaves her wrung out. After the men figured out where she went during those times, jokes started getting bantered around about women needing time to do their hair, or gossip, or cook, or – Steve’s losing track. She ignores it, keeps her head down at meal times; it’s not hard to, really. But then one guy makes a joke about how he’d like to spend two hours with Agent Carter out behind the kitchens and can he _come_ watch the next time, and she’s up on her feet and behind him, clutching him in a scrappy chokehold, before the laughter’s even died down. 

Everyone in the mess is too stunned to do anything, so she just jerks him back until he’s nearly sliding off the bench, and hisses, “She’s an officer, show her some goddamn respect.” Then she lets him go and steps back, watching him fall to the floor with an ungainly clatter of boots. Grabbing her plate, she tosses it in the bus pan and stomps out of the mess.

“Impressive show,” Agent Carter says to her the next day. “Producing and capitalizing on surprise, using your opponent’s balance against him. Let’s keep going.” 

Agent Carter fights hard and scrappy, using everything at hand and leaving no parts off-limits. It’s shocking, the pleasure that courses through Steve the first time she successfully tosses Agent Carter over her shoulder to the ground, a tight, hot tingling shooting to the tips of her limbs as she looks down at Agent Carter’s pleased, upside-down smile and the askew opening of her collar. 

Bucky’s an aggressive fighter, too, but she’s also quick and as tall and broad as a man – a slim man, perhaps. She can sling a half a pig over her shoulder like nothing, and can take down a boxer with three quick jabs. But Steve’s a head shorter and has crooked legs, and all she’s trained for are backyard squabbles, and this is war. She’ll keep her honor in bigger ways than fighting clean.

++

The next course is simple: a long, narrow pipe suspended by chains between two posts. It’s hard to tell, with it up in the air, but it’s maybe a dozen feet long, twenty inches wide, and well above the heads of every man there.

“The flag,” Phillips says, “is in the middle of that pipe. Go get it.”

Two men immediately start inspecting the posts, but they’re one piece and solidly in the ground; no repeats of Steve’s capture-the-flag moment here. Another jumps, tries to touch the pipe, missing by at least a foot. Hodge is eyeing the chains, looking for weaknesses.

“Hodge.” He looks at Steve, narrows his eyes. “Lift me up.”

“What?”

She jerks her chin to the end of the pipe. “Lift me up.” Setting her jaw stubbornly, she holds her hands out to his. He eyes her, glances up at the pipe. Comprehension unfurrows his brow.

“Sure thing, sweetheart,” he says, and, ignoring her hands, he grasps her waist and lifts her to his chest. For a too-long moment, his face is pressed up against her chest, and she scrambles to shove her body up higher, one hand on his shoulder, the other on the top of his head as she jerks her knee up, getting it onto his other shoulder. He makes a muffled laugh as she drags her other leg up, her crotch far too close to his face for her comfort. But she’s reaching, can almost get to the pipe – almost – 

“Fuck!” She’s leaned too far out and had to grab Hodge’s hair to keep from falling off. He doesn’t let her go, but his fingers dig harshly into the flesh at the back of her thighs. Ignoring his hands, she pushes herself up to kneeling, awkwardly straddling his head – and damn him for pulling her up so they’re face-to-face, just for the sake of her humiliation, but it does mean she gets a satisfying knock to the side of his head with her knee as she, trembling, gets one foot under her. 

Standing, up on her toes on Hodge’s shoulders, she can just get her forearms into the pipe, and it’s enough. With a great, ungainly scramble, she pulls herself into the pipe on elbows and belly, wriggling until her hips just clear the lip. It’s a tight fit, but it’s a fit, and at that moment she knows Colonel Phillips planned it precisely this way.

Crawling slowly, pushing off with her toes and dragging forward with her elbows, she moves into the center of the pipe, where the flag is affixed, hanging from the top. She tucks it between her teeth and keeps moving, coming out the other end and grappling with the suspension chain until she wriggles her way up to the top of the pipe and sits.

She waves the flag. It’s red, white, and blue.

++

The last day of training, and she still doesn’t know if she’s officially part of the US Army yet. There’s a hazy rumor that the top-secret project will have them broken up and sent individually to all the major conflict sites, and another that they’ll be dropped en masse in Berlin to hunt down Hitler. 

She thinks she doesn’t really mind what the orders are, just so long as she gets some. 

Agent Carter barks out commands as they work their way through jumping jacks, sit-ups, and push-ups. Steve can do fifteen now without having an asthma attack. She’s saying something about the relative grace of her elderly grandmother when someone shouts _grenade_ and Steve sees motion in the corner of her eye. 

She’ll think about it, later, try to figure out how she moved so quick, but right now all she can think about is the hard, tight presence of the grenade in her gut. Curling around it, small as she can make herself, she shouts something, warning people off, and squeezes her eyes shut.

_End of the line,_ she thinks. She wonders what they’ll tell Bucky.

The seconds tick by and she’s still intact; but then, they say your final moments slow down, time going all wrong. She feels a tap on her shoulder and lashes out with one arm. “Get back!”

“Rogers? Steve, it’s okay, it’s a dummy.” Agent Carter’s hand is still on her shoulder. She uncurls just enough to look up at her.

“Is this a test?”

“I think you just passed,” Agent Carter says.

“Hodge, Rogers, to my office,” Phillips calls. Agent Carter holds out a hand to help Steve up. “The rest of you, dismissed.”

Erskine is standing behind the desk in Phillips’s office; Steve and Hodge are not invited to sit. 

“The two of you have been chosen,” Erskine starts, and then explains something about a top secret project, much of which lands in a jumble in Steve’s head, which has been stalling on the fact that she’s been _chosen._

Phillips pushes a sheet of paper to each of them. “We haven’t tested it on a human yet,” he says, brusquely, “so we can’t really warn you about possible effects. But we still need everything on the up-and-up.” 

Steve looks down at the paper. _I, Siobhan Grace Rogers, consent to…_ At the bottom there’s a line for next-of-kin and another for her signature. She scribbles in Rachel Barnes’s name and the Barnes family address, then signs and pushes it back to Phillips. Next to her, Hodge is still staring at the paper, confounded, but he rouses as soon as she’s finished and quickly signs his, too.

“One more for you, Rogers,” Phillips says, pushing another page across the table. “Welcome to the US Army.”

++

She walks back across camp dazed. Enlistment papers with her name on them. _Private Siobhan Rogers._ She didn’t have to be told that she probably wouldn’t ever be able to tell people what she did, or that she might not even survive tomorrow’s procedure. The grim set of Phillip’s mouth told her loud and clear. But before she walked out, Erskine had clapped her on the shoulder and given her a small, straight-mouthed smile, so she has hope.

She hasn’t the stomach for dinner, so she goes back to what she’s come to think of as her barracks. They don’t have enough space for her to have a barrack to herself, and while she’d bunk down with the men, she’d come to figure out that that wasn’t how things worked. With much grumbling, Colonel Phillips’s aide had found an empty custodial closet and, after moving the brooms out, Steve had enough space for a cot and a hook to hang her clothes. 

Heck, it wasn’t much smaller than her apartment in Brooklyn. Sitting on the cot, she leans to unlace her boots and pull them off. Rummaging around under the cot, she pulls out a small box with her shoe polish and brush. She won’t go to the procedure tomorrow in a messy uniform.

She’s in a groove, fingertips darkened with dirt and mind carefully blank, when a neat little knock sounds on her door. Agent Carter steps in, the tiny closet immediately too small as Steve scrambles to her feet.

“As you were,” Agent Carter says, gesturing to the cot. Steve sits back down, right on the edge, and wishes she had a chair to offer. 

“Do you want to –” She gestures to the space next to her, aware all at once that it’s both the best she can offer and far too intimate, covered as it is with Steve’s bedsheet and blanket. Agent Carter doesn’t seem to mind, and sits, a scant foot away.

“I came to offer my congratulations,” she says. “And my ear, if you need it.”

“Ma’am?” 

“You’re about to experience something very intense. No one would begrudge you a little trepidation.” 

Steve looks down at her hands; they tremble, just a bit. Her feet dangle above the floor. The scabs are mostly healed, or on their way.

“Why don’t they choose you?” she asks, instead of saying she’s afraid she won’t live to see the scabs turn into pale scars. She scrubs hard at a stubborn bit of dirt around the edge of the sole. Agent Carter hums, thoughtfully.

“I don’t want it.” At Steve’s upward glance she adds, more kindly, “Oh, no, I don’t mean to imply that you shouldn’t. But I’m not an asthmatic, and I don’t fall ill with a fever every summer like clockwork.” Steve feels her cheeks warm; she brushes harder. Agent Carter notices. “Gosh, this is coming out wrong,” she says. She touches Steve’s hand, stills it.

“I only mean that –” She stops herself. “No, actually. The truth is that I’m scared.” She looks down; her hand is still on Steve’s. “I’m scared that it would change me. I – I quite like my job.” Glancing up, she catches Steve’s eye and gives a rueful half-smile. “And – it requires me to do things, at times, that are not, shall we say, not quite good.” She inhales, bites her lip. “I’m afraid the procedure might make me want to do those things even more than I already do.”

Steve rubs her thumb across the grommets of her boot, wiping away the polish so the brass gleams. “Will it change me?” She doesn’t look at Agent Carter.

“It might. We don’t really know.” Steve’s not certain if it’s that Agent Carter is very, very honest as a matter of course, or if, as she suspects, she pities Steve. “I think, though, that it will just amplify everything, make everything about you, well, bigger. More.” 

Steve frowns. She knows what it means to be small, and right now she feels every slight inch of her frame, under Agent Carter’s gaze and with the harsh, throbbing ache of five weeks’ hard training. But she’s not sure she can be _more_ ; there are some days when everything she feels bursts against her very skin.

“Am I disqualified if I say I’m terrified?” 

Agent Carter huffs a little; a laugh or a snort. “It would seem a perfectly natural response, if you ask me.” She shifts in her seat. Steve glances up to see her looking off to the corner of the room, pensive. “I can’t tell you much about the procedure, I’m afraid,” she says. “I mean, I wouldn’t be able to, but I don’t know much about it at any rate. And I don’t know what they plan to do with you, but I think they’ve made the right choice.” 

Steve looks away; her heart thuds. Leaning forward, Agent Carter takes her chin gently in the palm of her hand and guides her face back. When Steve is looking at her again, she leaves her hand there. “I didn’t know that I believed there was any goodness left in this infernal world anymore,” she says. “We need your heart, Steve. I fear for what we’ll become without it.” 

Under the cool touch of her hand, Steve’s cheek is hot, a flush rising up from her chest. “I’ll do my best, Ma’am,” is all she can think to say. Agent Carter’s hand lingers for a moment, then squeezes her shoulder and drops away. 

The room goes quiet. She wonders if Agent Carter might leave, now, but instead she settles back against the wall with a gentle sigh and nods her chin to Steve’s unmoving hands. 

“Oh,” she breathes out, almost surprised to see the boot still in her hand. Picking up her little tin of polish, she pops it open and spits on the shiny black surface, then rubs with her rag to bring the hard cake up to a cream. For a long moment, the only sound is the sweep of polish rag against leather. Steve rubs the toe of her boot; it’ll never come up shiny again, but the dirt’s come away. 

Agent Carter stretches one leg out in front of her, crosses it over her knee. Her stockings gleam. “You’re very thorough,” she says. Unaccountably, Steve feels a flush return to her cheeks. Agent Carter swings the tip of her toe. “Perhaps you could shine mine, sometime. If you’d like.” She wears sensible black laced pumps, with stitching across the toe. They gleam like warm melted butter. 

Steve tugs at her collar. “If you’d like. Ma’am.” When she looks up, Agent Carter is watching her, eyes half lowered and mouth just parted. 

“Yes. Perhaps.” She uncrosses her legs with a quick movement. “Private.” She’s out the door before Steve can scramble to her feet.

++

The cot’s not much worse than her old bed, either: too hard by half and never the right temperature. Tonight she strips back the wool blanket and the worn cotton sheet and lays on top of the bed in her skivvies. They’re only cotton, all she’s worn for ages, excepting one buttery yellow silk nightie Bucky’d given her for her birthday last year. 

It had been cool and soft against her fingertips when she unwrapped it, and Bucky had smiled brightly at her pleasure and told her it was about time she had something nice for herself. She’d thanked her with a big hug but hadn’t let herself look at it for the rest of the night, because her first thought, shameful and heavy in her belly, was that she wanted Bucky to see her wearing it. 

Bucky’d seen her plenty of times in her smalls: she’d washed her hair, clumsy and dripping, and on the hottest nights she’d sometimes stay at the Barnes house, where they had a back porch that looked out onto their own tiny square of grass, and she and Bucky and Bucky’s sisters would sleep on the porch in as little clothing as Mrs. Barnes would let them get away with. Even in their little place, with people pressing in on them from all angles and windows that looked out onto other people’s laundry and gossip, they left as much of their skin bare as possible in the high heat of summer. But wishing she could slip that golden yellow silk over her head and stand in front of Bucky, and feel Bucky’s eyes on her, was something quite different, and she knew it. 

She’d never confessed that one to Father Doherty. It seemed like a sin, but it wasn’t one that was spelled out for them during catechism on the regular, and that was enough for her to hold it close to her chest, hot and prickling. He never ferreted it out, but if he were in her head now, he’d tell her that God knows them all, the thoughts we’re too afraid to say out loud. He’d tell her to stop stepping her way around the real issue.

So: not afraid that she wants Bucky’s eyes on her. Afraid that it won’t ever happen. 

Folding her hands together, she places them at the base of her sternum, feels them rise and fall with her narrow breaths. She lets herself think about it.

If all goes right, this body will be changed. She thinks they’re talking about her asthma and her crooked legs, mostly, but they’re trying to make a soldier, true, so it’s probably more than that. A soldier: like Bucky. Bucky’s always been narrow: not skinny, not even slim, just compact. Muscles cut close to the bone. Tall, though, with rangy cheekbones. Steve pictures her mostly in charcoal, now; she doesn’t have any photographs in her pared-down belongings, so in her mind, Bucky’s face is the one she’s sketched over and over. She’s never seen her in uniform, looking like all the guys around her in a way Steve can’t imagine she herself ever will.

_Strongest gal I know._

They haven’t got as far as what they’ll do with her if it works. What good she’ll be: jumped up and healthy, sure, but still a girl. That’s why they’ve got Hodge, too – a real soldier. Bucky’s last letter had said they were moving, though she hadn’t said where. Couldn’t, probably. The second part of her training was in England, though – one letter complaining about the rain and praising the beer all in one sentence – so that means Europe. If Steve could ask for anything, once tomorrow’s done, it would be that: to go where the fighting is. To use her fists, loose, thumbs out. 

++

No one says it, but Steve realizes there’s no question about her going first. It’s a highly experimental procedure, after all, and a girl is far more expendable than a well-trained, strong man at his physical peak. Agent Carter leads her through the antique store and the proprietress-agent opens a secret bookshelf door, revealing a gleaming laboratory. It’s like something out of the comic books she and Bucky shared as kids, all shiny and clean, full of mechanical gizmos and vials with strange liquids. 

But then, she realizes, what they’re proposing to do would also fit right in. 

Agent Carter takes her behind a screen and hands her a pair of trousers and a tee shirt, then turns her back. Leaving her uniform in a pile, Steve pulls on the garments. They’re both too big; she has to hold up the waistband to keep it from sliding off her hips. Before she comes out from behind the screen, Agent Carter turns around and gives her a once-over. 

“Don’t change too much, Rogers,” she says, quietly. Her fingertips just barely skim the back of Steve’s hand, but the touch is sharp, electric.

“No, ma’am,” she says.

There’s some fuss around her about vaccinations and some such; her ears are buzzing. Finally, Erskine gives her a small nod.

Underneath her, the table is cold. It seeps through the fabric of her clothes. Straps and monitors are applied to her body, and then the injections start. The serum is cold, icy in her veins, but she is no stranger to needles and fluids and her body being prodded and penetrated. She breathes in, out; she holds her hands loose, thumbs out. The chamber closes.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first in a planned trilogy; if you would like to see more, please subscribe to the series!
> 
> ++
> 
> Footnotes:  
> Most of the art history stuff is true:   
> [The Art Students League](http://www.theartstudentsleague.org/history-art-students-league-new-york/), a semi-cooperative art school founded by art students in 1875, including many women   
> [Ben Shahn and Bernarda Bryson (later Bryson Shahn) and the Bronx General Post Office](http://www.lehman.edu/vpadvance/artgallery/publicart/sites/postoffice.html), murals on the theme of the "Resources of America," completed in 1939. They did have to paint out the originally-chosen Whitman quote for a different passage. Ben and Bernarda met working under Diego Rivera on the [destroyed Rockefeller Center Project](http://www.npr.org/2014/03/09/287745199/destroyed-by-rockefellers-mural-trespassed-on-political-vision), and Ben was roommates with Walker Evans for a time.   
> [Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art](http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcsurrealism1.htm), published in 1938 and signed by Andre Breton and Diego Rivera, though it is now generally believed that Rivera signed in place of Leon Trotsky, who was the actual co-author.
> 
> ++
> 
> Title comes from the first poem of H.D.'s WWII _Trilogy_ , "The Walls Do Not Fall":
> 
> Grant us strength to endure   
> a little longer,
> 
> now the heart's alabaster  
> is broken;
> 
> we would feed forever  
> on the amber honey-comb
> 
> of your remembered greeting,  
> but the old-self,
> 
> still half at-home in the world,  
> cries out in anger...


End file.
